UnboundID Blog

The average amount of time people spend on mobile devices has risen to 162 minutes each day*. As this number increases, companies are embracing the opportunity to offer their customers mobile apps that deliver a new level of convenience, from finding directions to making purchases and earning loyalty rewards—all at their fingertips no matter where they are.

While we have more opportunities than ever before to reach customers and deliver great customer experiences over a growing number of channels and devices, we also have more opportunities to get it wrong. Disjointed interactions caused by disparate customer engagement systems and siloed data can leave your customers feeling frustrated enough to turn to a competitor. And in today’s social media world, the damage doesn’t stop with just one customer. They can share their annoyance with their family and friends with just a quick Tweet or Facebook post resulting in more customers for your competitor—and less for you.

Jim Stagnitto is Practice Director of Data Services for a2c Consulting. His experience covers master data management (MDM), reference data management, business intelligence and application integration. He has experience designing and implementing cloud-based systems for data management and works frequently with large companies in healthcare, banking and insurance.

“The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.” — Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management, 1954

While we live in a vastly different world than the one Peter Drucker knew, the core purpose of business as he stated it in 1954 hasn’t changed. Most companies understand this at a deep level, and many have made significant investments in customer experience technologies, particularly Customer Relationship Management (CRM). In fact, Gartner proves my point when it reports that CRM was the top software revenue growth market in 2013 with $20 billion and a 13.7% Annual Growth Rate (AGR).1

CRM systems give marketing and business teams incredibly effective tools to create and keep customers. Most CRM solutions today encompass all of the key aspects of customer outreach—social marketing, e-mail marketing, marketing automation, service and support and sales solutions. Whether it’s a packaged offering or a home-grown solution, these platforms drive the interactions and touch points that customers directly experience. They are crucial to staying in business and staying competitive.

Identity management has never been easy, but in the past, the environment and the objectives were more straightforward than they are today. Typically, we were engaging with customers in our Wawa stores—a single interaction point that was predominantly focused around a transaction. But in just a few short years, engaging with our customers has completely changed, and we’re expecting even more changes in the near future.

Customers are now increasingly mobile which has resulted in a growing number of touchpoints across multiple channels, devices and applications. We want to continue to provide our customers with exceptional customer experiences and that means engaging with them where they are—conveniently over their smartphones, tablets or the Internet. Add to this the fact that successful customer engagement is now not only transactional, but a full brand loyalty experience with offers and services that make our customers’ lives better and easier. It’s evident why a new set of demands is being placed on the technology infrastructures that support consumer interactions.

Ishan Kumar, Product Manager and a new member of the UnboundID team, talks about the significant role he sees Consumer Identity Management playing in the next evolution of technology in our lives.

After 15 years in the IT trenches, I recognized an opportunity to move into a role that blurred the lines of advancing the use of technology in our communities and how to build it. In Austin, Texas, there is no shortage of tech companies figuring out how to enrich our lives and make things easier. But, one recurring theme I’ve noticed these companies struggle with is how to deliver value to people if they don’t know enough about the person behind the device. This realization was the light bulb moment for me; consumer identity management is the area where significant investment is needed to drive the experiences people want.

Many IT organizations have invested in custom applications that provide identity services like profile management, communication opt in/outs, extracting CRM data or collecting user clicks to anticipate what a customer wants to do. But underneath all of these capabilities is the challenge of consistently identifying the consumer.

The timeless Tina Turner ballad, “What’s Love Got To Do With It” delivers an honest, albeit provocative assertion about human nature. What does this have to do with marketing in the modern era?

Well, at its core, successful marketing is about a brand’s ability to appeal to and connect with our human nature: our psychological and social qualities. Sounds simple enough, but it’s not. The expectations and behavior of the modern-day consumer introduces obstacles that brands must navigate to make and keep that connection with customers. Let’s dive deeper into three primary obstacles facing the modern-day marketer and explain why identity - the definitive “who” and their associated likes, preferences, and profile attributes - is a brand’s single most important navigational tool in connecting with our human nature.

Obstacle #1:The multiplicity of engagement channels

As consumers interact with brands across a growing number of channels, devices and applications, delivering an experience that connects with the customer becomes a more challenging because there are more potential points of failure. The consumer interprets the brand experience equally regardless of whether they are talking to a customer service representative over the phone, shopping on your website, or checking their point balance in a mobile loyalty application. Connecting with the consumer across engagement channels requires a common services approach to identity. Said another way, identity is to multichannel marketing what Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has meant to software development. Brands that continue to treat identity simply as an artifact of one channel will never realize the full potential for their products and services to connect with me as a consumer.

Great customer experiences are a critical part of success for organizations today. Customer-centricity has reached new levels of complexity for brands. Increasingly savvy and busy consumers are expecting frictionless experiences across every channel, and organizations must deliver increasingly complex applications and services across these multiple channels.

Marketers are allocating larger portions of their budgets to online advertising. According to the CMO Council, the industry spent $137.53 billion in 2014, and that number is predicted to reach nearly $200 billion, surpassing TV ad spending by 2018. But lying in the shadows of all the hype is a sinister threat skewing digital marketing’s ROI numbers. It may sound like a bad sci-fi plot, but the reality is online advertisers have been paying for useless ads clicked by fraudulent “bots” instead of human beings. And the malicious practice is more pervasive and damaging than anyone thought.

It seems every week we’re seeing new data breaches in the headlines. This week it was license plate scanners and Blackphone vulnerabilities Between federal laws, varying state laws, legacy technologies, new technologies and the constantly evolving ways data is compromised, protecting data, especially in customer-facing environments, requires constant vigilance and focus.

Today, International Privacy Day, is a particularly good moment for all businesses to pause and assess their data security practices. Here’s a quick list of some of UnboundID’s top tips for protecting consumer identity data: